The present disclosure relates to computer data storage systems, and more specifically, to expiration handling of block level backups of virtual machines.
Virtualization enables computing entities to efficiently utilize the resources of powerful computer servers to provide disparate computing environments to customers. Computing entities, for example, may deploy several different operating systems over a physical or hardware layer made up of, for example, a homogenous set of computing servers. The operating systems may be executed in virtual machines managed by a virtualization manager deployed in a virtualization layer between the operating systems and the hardware layer. The virtualization manager may be configured to apportion the resources of computing hardware between the virtual machines. Each virtual machine, for example, may be allocated a datastore to serve as a virtual disk on which the operating systems executing within the virtual machines may create partition and construct filesystems. Virtual disks, like physical disks, may be backed-up periodically to enable recover from system or data integrity failures.